How to Farm Chia Coin Using Chia’s New Official Pools

Pools finally make the eco-friendly coin viable for small farmers

Chia Coin exploded onto the cryptocurrency scene earlier this year, billing itself as a greener, less environmentally-damaging alternative to traditional coins like Bitcoin. Rather than relying on power-hungry GPUs, Chia Coin (abbreviated as XCH) is a storage-based cryptocurrency, which means it uses hard drive space to confirm blocks and award coins to miners, who Chia calls “farmers.”

When I wrote about Chiacoin a few months ago, I shared the process for setting up a basic Chia mining operation.

But at the time, there was a problem. Chia’s popularity surged so much after its launch that farming it as an individual was basically impossible. At the time of my writing, an individual with a single 100 gigabyte Chia “plot” would have to wait, on average, over 40 years to farm a single Chia Coin. Today, a user with a single plot would receive a coin only every 199 years. Most Chia farmers have many plots, reducing the waiting time to much less than two centuries. Still, solo mining was impractical for small operators when I wrote my guide, and remains so today.

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The same challenge exists for most cryptocurrencies, and most solve it through pooling. Rather than creating coins alone, multiple miners combine together, pooling their efforts and sharing jointly in the rewards when a member of the pool finds a coin. Pools are a way of spreading the risk and reward of mining across hundreds or thousands of people. They’re absolutely essential for all but the largest cryptocurrency creators.

Chia Launches Pools

Chia, for whatever reason, either failed to grasp this or never expected their coin to do so well so quickly. When Chia Coin launched, there were no pooling functions built into the platform. As Chia Coin’s popularity surged and the coin became harder to farm, unofficial pools–many requiring farmers to install potentially sketchy executable files–sprung up. All the while, Chia scrambled to add pooling to their coin. In July, they finally succeeded, officially adding pooled farming to the Chia protocol. Pools are available through the official Chia blockchain software program, which now has a dedicated tab devoted to pooling.

To implement pooling, Chia had to make changes to how it handles “plots”, the chunks of hard drive space which people use to farm the coin. If you’re already farming Chia Coin, there’s good and bad news. If you’re contented with farming solo (or you’re already in an unofficial pool, which Chia doesn’t recommend), you can continue with business as usual–the new pooling changes won’t invalidate existing solo plots.

If you want to connect your existing plots to an official pool, though, you’re out of luck. You’ll have to replot your existing plots if you want them to work in an official Chia pool. That process is time consuming and puts wear on your computer’s drives, so the need to replot isn’t ideal. If this is your first foray into Chia Coin, you’ll be starting with pool-compatible plots from day one, so that’s a definite win for new farmers.

How to Farm in a Pool

If you’ve never worked with Chia before, begin by following my original instructions to get the Chia blockchain installed and synced. Next, to get started farming in a pool, you’ll need a little Chia Coin. That’s because Chia uses an NFT-like smart contract to connect your plots to a pool, and a tiny bit of the coin is needed for the contract. If you don’t have any yet, don’t worry–you can get a little by providing your wallet address (find it in the Wallet tab of the Chia blockchain software) to the official Chia faucet. The faucet dispenses tiny amounts of XCH for testing and development purposes. Don’t rejoice over free money just yet–each “drip” from the Chia faucet is worth only a tiny fraction of a penny.

Once you have some XCH, follow the instructions in the Pool tab to join a pool. Confusingly, Chia doesn’t operate its own pool, and doesn’t officially recommend specific pools. That means you’ll need to track one down on your own. The bigger your pool, the more frequent your payouts will be. It’s also important to choose a reputable pool which won’t run off with its users farmed coins (you can always leave a pool if it doesn’t pay you, so the risk here is likely minimal). Chia has a detailed guide to choosing pools.

I chose to farm with Space Pool, because it seems to have a good reputation, is operated by a US-based LLC in Washington State, and controls about 960 Petabytes of attached storage across more than 30,000 farmers. You don’t need a pool’s permission to join — just find the pool’s address and paste it into the “Connect to Pool” field in the Chia blockchain software’s Pool tab. Space Pool has joining instructions here. If your pool is valid, you’ll see some stats about it, and you can click “Create” to make your Plot NFT.

Once your pool connection is ready, jump over to the Plots tab to create some new plots, or to access ones you already have. You can follow my previous instructions for creating a plot, but this time, make sure to select the Plot NFT for your target pool. It will show a whimsical name, which is assigned automatically when you create the Plot NFT (mine is called White Wildfowl). Once your plot is ready, it will start farming to the pool, and you’ll start getting regular payouts.

Pooling and Profits

Chia pools pay you in proportion to how much storage you contribute to the pool, and how well the pool’s farmers do overall. When any farmer in the pool receives a Chia Coin (this happens roughly every 11 minutes in Space Pool as I write this), the coin is distributed among the pool’s members. There’s a small catch, though, which makes Chia different from many other cryptocurrencies. The farmer who found the coin receives 1/8 of its value, while the other 7/8 go to the pool for distribution. That creates an incentive for individual farmers to pool and claim rewards.

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Remember that your Chia blockchain software will need to stay active and your computer will need to remain on for you to farm. As you farm, you can go to the Pool tab to see how your various Plot NFTs are doing. To see more stats from a compatible pool, click on the three vertical dots to the right of your NFT plot’s name, and select “View Pool Login Link”. Paste the link in your browser, and you’ll get a reporting page from your pool. My Space Pool page tells me how many “points” I’ve earned towards pooled rewards, as well as my total farmed space and total payouts so far (including pending payouts where I haven’t yet reached the minimum amount to receive a payment).

Source: https://diylifetech.com/how-to-farm-chia-coin-using-chias-new-official-pools-698661646f72?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency